Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes

Description

Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapescritically examines the representations, constructions, and imaginings of the relationship between the human and non-human worlds in contemporary African literature and culture. It offers innovative, incisive, and critical perspectives on the importance of sustaining a symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment. The book thus carries African scholarship beyond the mere analysis of themes and style to ethical and activist roles of literature having an impact on readers and the public. It is a scholarship geared towards rectifying ecological imbalance that is prevalent in many parts of the continent that forms the setting, context, and thematic discourse of the works or authors studied in this book. Besides sensitizing the African readership to the need for the restoration of harmony between man and the environment, this book equally aims to further familiarize scholars and students working on African literature and culture with the theoretical concerns of eco-criticism. Cover Title page Copyright page Contents Foreword Introduction: African Cultural Art Forms, Eco-activism, and (Eco)-logical Consciousness 1. Representations of the Effects of Colonial Land Policies in two Zimbabwean Novels 2. Landscaping as a Plot and Character Development Medium in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow 3. Eco-activism in Contemporary African Literature: Zakes Mda’s Heart of Redness and Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist 4. Isidore Okpewho’s Tides and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and a Day: A Kinesis of Eco-activism from Theory to Praxis 5. Nature and Environment in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God 6. Degraded Environment and Destabilized Women in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow 7. The Niger Delta, Environment, Women and the Politics of Survival in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow 8. Women as Victims, Environmentalists and Eco-activists in Vincent Egbuson’s Love My Planet 9. Can the Earth Be Belted? Rethinking Eco-literacy and Ecological Justice in Wangari Maathai’s 10. Nature and Social Responsibility in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Tanure Ojaide’s The Tale of the Harmattan: Cross-Border Studies in Social Responsibility 11. Poetic Rites, Minority Rights, and the Politics of Otherness in Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues and Home Songs 12. Transcending the Discontents of Global Capitalism: Toward the Dialectics of De-commodified Environment in Daydream of Ants and Other Poems and The Eye of the Earth 13. Poetics of Environmental Agitation: A Stylistic Reading of Hope Eghagha’s Rhythms of the Last Testament and The Governor’s Lodge and Other Poems 14. Niger Delta Dystopia and Environmental Despoliation in Tanure Ojaide’s Poetry 15. Eco-survival in the Poetry of G. ‘Ebinyo Ogbowei 16. Poetics of Environmental Degradation in Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues 17. For Common Corn: Eco-ing Bole Butake’s Concerns in Lake God, The Survivors, and And Palm-Wine Will Flow 18. Destabilizing the Images of the African Forest As a Conceptual Space for Renegotiating African Identities during the Zimbabwe Armed Liberation Struggle in the Film Flame (1996) Notes on Editor and Contributors Index Back cover